Chip Industry Week In Review

Space Forge autonomously generated plasma aboard its ForgeStar-1 satellite, utilizing extreme low Earth orbit (LEO) conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth of wide- and ultra-wide bandgap materials, GaN, SiC, aluminum nitride, and diamonds.

Copper prices surged to a historic record of $12,600 per metric ton, an increase of more than 40% YOY, which will impact the cost of data center buildout and chip production.

TSMC announced that it started 2nm (N2) technology volume production in Q4 2025, as planned.

Automotive:

China’s BYD was the top EV seller in 2025, overtaking Tesla, whose sales dropped for the second year in a row.

Chinese carmakers skirted around European tariffs in 2025 by exporting hybrids, exploiting a loophole left when the EU only applied extra tariffs to EVs, but not hybrids. Chinese car exports to Europe rose 26%, year over year.

Deals:

SMIC will soon have full ownership of SMNC. China’s largest foundry announced plans to acquire the remaining 49% share of SMNC’s 12-inch IC wafer manufacturing company for ~$5.79B.

NVIDIA purchased ~$5B in Intel stock on December 29, under an agreement announced in September.

Softbank plans to buy DigitalBridge‘s data center infrastructure for ~$4B. The deal includes data centers, cell towers, fiber networks, and edge infrastructure.

IPOs:

Chinese semiconductor companies are going public. GPGPU maker Biren Technology raised ~US $717M in its IPO. GigaDevice, a fabless semiconductor company that develops flash memory, MCUs, sensor, analog products, is targeting a $600M haul in its IPO this month. Baidu‘s chip unit Kunlunxin is planning to spin off and is planning its IPO. Last month, GPU makers Moore Threads and MetaX had IPOs on the Shanghai exchange.

Geopolitics:

China is mandating that at least half of semiconductor equipment is made domestically for any new fab expansions, reports Reuters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is allowing Samsung, SK hynix, and TSMC to import American chipmaking equipment to their Chinese facilities in 2026.

Market Forces:

OECD‘s recent report on wafer fabrication capacity provides insights into wafer fabrication capacity by economy, process node density, process technology, and business model. The report also emphasized a “structural rigidity” in the substitutability of production between fabs.

IDC predicts both the PC and smartphone markets will be impacted this year by the memory shortage crisis, with smartphone shipments shrinking up to 5% and PCs up to ~9%. Memory makers are shifting their focus to HBM and DDR5 for AI data centers at the expense of general-purpose memory modules.

Top Tech Talks:

Rising complexity, new architectures, and AI’s permeation of nearly everything left engineers struggling to keep up in 2025. Here’s what chip industry engineers were watching this year.

Quick Links To More News:

Global
Vehicles and Batteries
Security
In-Depth
Trending Tech Talk
Research
Reports and Opinions
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia:

• KAIST HBM expert Kim Jeong-ho predicts a “golden age of semiconductor K-memory,” with the memory hierarchy shifting to HBM and HBF (high-bandwidth flash memory), and memory-centric computing. He called it an opportunity S. Korea must seize.
• S. Korea exports grew 3.8% versus the prior year, with semiconductor exports up over 20%.
• ORF‘s report, “The Evolving Semiconductor Supply Chain Landscape: Lessons for India’s Semiconductor Mission,” outlines India’s largest ever commitment to IC manufacturing and makes a number of recommendations, including a less “scattered and diffused” strategy.
• Yole‘s insights of the PCIM India event this year looks at how India can expand its power electronics ecosystem.

Europe:

• CLEPA weighed in on the EU’s new Automotive Package, finding the “suggested measures are too complex, do not do enough to address the crisis of the automotive sector, and fail to safeguard European production and jobs against international competition. Critical concerns raised by the automotive supply industry remain unresolved.”

Vehicles and Batteries

Infineon and Flex collaborated to launch a zone controller development kit engineered to accelerate SDV-ready E/E architecture development.  The modular design allows engineers to quickly configure zone control units (ZCU) implementations, reducing development cycle time.

Flying cars advance:

• The U.S. Dept of Transportation published an Advanced Air Mobility National Strategy, providing a roadmap and federal infrastructure for eVTOLs
  (electric Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft) and other automated aircraft.
• Electric air taxi company Joby Aviation plans to increase its manufacturing capacity in the U.S., launch air service in Dubai, and build 25 new US veriport sites.
• Joby’s rival Ehang, a Chinese eVTOL maker, can now fly sightseeing tours in two Chinese cities.
• Recently, Archer bought its own airport for $126M, 3 miles from LAX, to serve as a hub for its LA air taxi service. The company also plans to bring its eVTOL to Saudi Arabia.
• Wondering what the cost of operating flying cars? TU Braunschweig and others developed a direct operating cost model of eVTOLs.

Robotaxi wars:

• Waymo has more than tripled its public rides this year versus 2024, making over 14 million trips and claiming a 10X reduction in serious injury crashes versus human drivers.
• Meanwhile Tesla is taking aim at Waymo, claiming Tesla has superior vision-based system versus its rival, which failed during a San-Francisco power outage. Waymo is now updating its protocols to address the power outage issue.

Vehicles and battery research and reports:

• Test Case Specification Techniques and System Testing Tools in the Auto Industry (Mercedes, Stuttgart, TUM)
• Addressing Li-ion Battery Storage Fires: Impacts & Root Causes
• How safe are self-driving cars really? Experts weigh in (Northeastern)
• The Need for Speed: EV Motors Breaking the 30,000rpm Barrier (IDTechEx)
• Investigating and Addressing Security Breaches in Vehicle Infotainment Systems (Swinburne et al.)
• Visual token pruning framework that enables autonomous driving AI to “drive like a human” (XPENG, Peking U.)

Research

• Reducing Write Latency of DDR5 Memory by Exploiting Bank-Parallelism (Georgia Tech)
• Making Strong Error-Correcting Codes Work Effectively for HBM in AI Inference (Rensselaer, ScaleFlux, IBM)
• Aging Aware Steepening of the Fault Coverage Curve of a Scan Based Transition Fault Test Set (Purdue)
• Improved thermal management and manufacturing flexibility in power module heatsinks (KITECH et al.)
• Gold nanostructures: A way for to assemble on flexible devices (UMG)
• 28nm FeFET-Based CAM for Energy-Efficient Similarity Search and Few-Shot Learning (Notre Dame, Fraunhofer)

Find more semiconductor research here.

Security

Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks plan to merge, forming an AI cloud-native physical security company under the Brivo name. Dean Drako, founder of both companies, will serve as CEO.

Microsoft rolled out a hardware-accelerated BitLocker, a security upgrade designed to provide better performance and security for current and future NVMe devices.

Two former employees of cybersecurity response companies pled guilty to ALPHV BlackCat ransomware attacks, which netted over $1.2M from one victim alone. The pair face up to 20 years in prison.

Recent security articles and research:

• Generative Golden Reference Hardware Fuzzing (TU Darmstadt)
• AI Workloads at the Edge: Ensuring Performance, Privacy, and Security
• Small Language Models Create New Security Risks
• Harnessing Silicon Lifecycle Management For Chip Security
• Hardware Similarity Evaluation Framework Using Graph Neural Network (CAS)
• Securing Cross-Domain Internet of Drones: An RFF-PUF Allied Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol With Over-the-Air Enrollment

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

In-Depth Newsletters

Top stories and special reports in SE’s December newsletters:

Systems and Design:
Special report on programmable chip changes; when to move to multi-die; 2025 systemic changes.

Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Reliability shifts to materials stack; 2.5D progress; ML in materials discovery; chiplet standards with 3DKs; photonic chip test challenges; AI in IC manufacturing.

Low Power-High Performance
Special report on chiplets vs. soft IP; IC power limits; HPC simulation issues; quantum innovation and investment.

Test, Measurement and Analytics
Adaptive test for HPC, AI chips; 3D NAND metrology; zero-trust data sharing; DFT shifts further left; equipment connectivity.

Automotive, Security and Enabling Technologies
Special report on securing ICs using SLM; small language model security risks; physical AI safety concerns; IIoT with Edge AI.

Trending Tech Talk

Agentic AI In Chip Design: What comes next after generative AI, and how that will be used in EDA.

Reports and Opinions

• Quantum sector enters new phase after a decade of rapid growth (OECD)
• The Quantum Era Crept Up While You Were Watching AI (Bloomberg)
• MicroLED reaches a make-or-break phase as first production lines ramp in 2025 (Yole)
• CES 2026 – Great Expectations (Counterpoint)

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here.

• Advances in ATPG: From Power and Timing Awareness to Intelligent Pattern Search with AI, Jan. 14
• Physics-Based Foundations for Power Supply Design, Jan. 14
• Accelerate IC Layout Parasitic Analysis with ParagonX, Jan. 15

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including: